The initial draft of the Arcata Gateway Area Plan was released in December 2021. Eleven months later, on October 1, 2022, the second draft was released. Initially the wording regarding this 2nd draft was:

“This updated Plan incorporated recommended modifications from a variety of City committees as well as public comment submitted since the release of the draft document in December 2021.”

Many of us were immediately aware that not all of the City Committees’ and Planning Commissioners’ recommendations had been included, and only a small fraction of the public comment had been included in this 2nd draft. Fairly quickly, a new narrative arrived.

“An important clarification for the community is that the newly released Gateway Area Plan is an interim revision of the Plan, which incorporates Committee and public input received as of 9/30/22 that comports with the draft plan.
Recommendations for changes to the Plan that are either in conflict with the draft or have competing recommendations are available for review here. [Link to the 2/1/2023 “Other Considerations” table.] They will be considered by the Planning Commission at its February 28 and/or March 14 meeting(s).”

On the City’s “Arcata Gateway Area Plan” webpage, the insertion of this caveat is clear, as a different type face and size are used.

The 2nd draft came out in October, but it wasn’t until February — four months later — that this “Other Considerations” table came out.

Among the bungles in this Staff’s version of Committee and public input of things that do not “comport” (that is: Agrees with) are:

• Describing the Transportation Safety Committee’s strong recommendation against the K-L Street couplet as “Maintain current configuration” and “remove concept of L as an arterial couplet with K from figures.”
• “Create new zone type surrounding Creamery District” is shown as coming from a “Public Member.” In actuality this came from the former Chair of the Planning Commission Julie Vaissade-Elcock, as well as a letter signed by 23 members of the community.
• The suggestion that the Gateway Districts be aligned with the Coastal Zone boundaries, to reduce the changes required to the Gateway Plan if the California Coastal Commission sees issues with building in the Coastal Zone.
• Dozens of suggestions from members of the Planning Commission and members of the City Committees are absent, and perhaps hundreds of suggestions from Arcata citizens are missing. The “Other Considerations” table was promoted as including all proposed changes that were in conflict with the draft Plan. This obvious falsehood was finally disposed of, five months later, when the Community Development Director claimed that it was never the intent to have this table contain all of the conflicting 

The “Other Considerations” tables, from most recent to earliest.

July 25, 2023
Brown Act Violations. This document (undated) was added to. It contains topics from the June 27 version that were omitted from the July 19 version, plus the topics that were added.

The Brown Act requires that documents sent to the Commissioners also be sent to the public at the same time. In this case, seeing as the Commissioners have already provide their input on this document — outside of any meeting — and that this is the first that the public has seen this document, it appears to be the case that the Commissioners saw this document before the pubic saw it.

What’s more, the spreadsheet columns for the “Source” of the recommendation, as well as the column showing “Policy Implications / Staff recommendation” have both been removed. Without these columns, the public viewing it does not know where this recommendation came from, and does not even know what the Staff recommendation is — that clearly the Planning Commissioners are voting on ! Not only is this absurd, it is also a further violation of California’s Brown Act transparency laws.

July 11, 2023  Has some topics omitted from the previous version. We can observe that the Brown Act specifies that the City’s employees do not have the right “to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know.”

June 27, 2023
In this version, the Community Development Director took it upon himself to enter “Concur with Staff” in 13 places, even though the Commission had not discussed the contents of this table.  “We’ve inserted what we expect you’re going to say, as a Commission — that you concur with staff on this issue, for example” is what the Director said.

June 13, 2023

February 1, 2023. The first “Other Considerations” table, issued four months after “competing recommendations are included in a table that will be published separately” was written (Note the use of the present tense “recommendations are included in a table” — as though to imply that table already existed.)